Tonight the Amherst Select Board voted unanimously to extend the Nuclear Free Zone all way to our neighbor to the north by urging support for a shut down of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant next year on the original schedule forty years after the controversial plant was first commission.
Amherst added their voice to 51 other communities who also oppose the current plan by Entergy to continue generating power after receiving a 20-year license extension from federal regulators. The state legislature has voted to close the plant and the company filed a lawsuit claiming federal authority supersedes state authority.
Amherst, along with Cambridge, was on the forefront of the Nuclear Freeze movement having voted itself a "Nuclear Free Zone" in 1988 and opposed the siting of a GWEN tower (a post nuclear attack communications system) anywhere in Amherst.
Select Board chair Stephanie O'Keeffe read an email from Senator Stan Rosenberg (D-Amherst) urging support for the resolution.
To her credit, Ms. O'Keeffe has occasionally asserted that certain issues were outside of her expertise as a Select Board member.
ReplyDeleteVermont Yankee and the safety concerns it may or may not present is inside, apparently.
Being opposed to nuclear power is certainly a popular position to take at this particular time.....at least, until the next set of compelling data comes in on climate change.
In Amherst, we react, react, react, and then we call it "being enlightened."
Exactly one year ago, the BP oil well blew up. Personally, I think that did/is doing more damage than the Japanese nuke will -- and do not forget that there is this massive pool of super-cold LNG that is drifting around down there, something which will eventually get convected upward where it will RAPIDLY expand in the lower pressure/warmer water and this will be messy.
ReplyDeleteMy personal theory of the Bermuda Triangle stories is much smaller amounts of LNG venting out of natural cracks in the sea floor and coming up as bubbles under ships....
Or, as we're seeing, one person's "being enlightened" is another person's "backyard peril".
ReplyDeleteIf only we could solve real, thorny policy problems with Select Board resolutions.......oh, what a lovely world it would be.
I did notice SB member Aaron Hayden added a clause praising the town's efforts to tap other safer forms of renewable energy, an overt nod to the solar farm on the old landfill.
ReplyDeleteOld folks with nothing better to do.
ReplyDeleteWay to go grampuh!
Now, now. It beats zoning out in front of a TV or computer screen.
ReplyDeleteThey love wind. Both ends.
ReplyDelete